NY pushes back health care enrollment deadline to Tuesday

A key enrollment deadline for New York’s health exchange has been pushed back a day.

New Yorkers will be able to enroll in an insurance plan through the state’s exchange until 11:55 p.m. Tuesday for coverage beginning Jan. 1, according to the state Department of Health. The deadline had been set for Monday night.

The extension came as the state reported a burst of enrollments over the past week. Since the exchange — known as NY State of Health — launched in October, 188,546 state residents have enrolled, up nearly 54,000 since Dec. 16.

“We are continuing to see very high enrollment activity as we approach the Dec. 23rd deadline for coverage beginning January 1, 2014,” Donna Frescatore, executive director of NY State of Health, said in a statement. “We are pleased that nearly 189,000 New Yorkers have enrolled so far, and another 422,000 have completed applications for quality, low-cost health insurance.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how many of those enrollments were for private plans and how many were for Medicaid.

While the state exchange’s website hadn’t experienced the same type of web issues as the federal healthcare.gov, potential enrollees reported website glitches and lengthy wait times with the New York exchange’s call center in recent days.

The deadline extension in New York, which opted to run its own insurance marketplace to carry out the federal Affordable Care Act, mimics one at the federal level. The White House announced Monday that it would also push its enrollment deadline back to Tuesday.